Worrying About Reagan

On Monday, the New York Times’s longtime medical correspondent, Dr. Lawrence Altman, dealt with the question of whether Ronald Reagan’s dementia had begun to affect his mind during his Presidency. The issue was raised by Reagan’s son, Ron Reagan, who wrote in his new memoir, “My Father at 100,” of his impression that “something was amiss,” provoking furious denunciations from many of the late President’s supporters.

Altman, who covered Reagan’s health for the Times during his Presidency, wrote that in “my extensive interviews with his White House doctors, key aides and others, I found no evidence that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia as president.” Further, Altman wrote, “until Ron Reagan’s memoir appeared, no other family member—and not Edmund Morris, the official biographer who spent seven years with Mr. Reagan in the White House—publicly hinted that he showed evidence of Alzheimer’s as president.” Altman also spoke to Ron Reagan by phone, and had him clarify that although Alzheimer’s had likely begun its course in the brain, medically speaking, “We’re not talking anything that approaches the level of dementia … not to a level where something needed to be done.”

Unlike Altman, I have absolutely no medical expertise, but I covered Reagan as the White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and have a different recollection concerning the views of key Reagan aides. By early 1987, several top White House advisers were so concerned about Reagan’s mental state that they actually talked among themselves about invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which calls for the Vice-President to take over in the event of the President’s incapacity.

As described in a 1988 book I co-authored with Doyle McManus, “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President,” by March 1, 1987, Reagan was suffering both politically and personally from the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal. Howard Baker, his third chief of staff, was just about to take over from Don Regan, whom Nancy Reagan had helped to dispatch, and the senior staff was in turmoil. Before taking command of the situation, Baker asked his trusted aide James Cannon, who had been the domestic-policy adviser to Gerald Ford, to put together a confidential report on what had gone wrong inside the White House. One by one, Cannon had called in the top White House aides and debriefed them. What Cannon learned floored him.

As Cannon summarized his findings, on the record, in our book, “They told stories about how inattentive and inept the president was. He was lazy; he wasn’t interested in the job. They said he wouldn’t read the papers they gave him—even short position papers and documents. They said he wouldn’t come over to work—all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence.”

Cannon was astounded to learn, too, that the aides “felt free to sign his initials on documents, without noting that they were acting for him.” When Cannon asked a group of key aides who among them had authority to sign for Reagan, there was a long, uncomfortable silence, after which one answered, “Well—everybody, and nobody.”

Altman wrote that even though Ron Reagan felt that “something was amiss” with his father’s mind around this period, “considering resignation was never an issue.” But in fact, Cannon and another Baker aide working with him, Thomas Griscomb, actually privately considered the possibility that it might be necessary to involuntarily retire Reagan. They told Baker that based on what Reagan’s own aides had told them about his mental state, if their dire accounts proved true, it might be in the interests of the country to have the Vice-President take over.

Baker was skeptical. He suggested that rather than relying on the second-hand accounts of White House aides, he and the others needed to observe Reagan first-hand, themselves. And so, on his first day as White House Chief of Staff, Howard Baker, James Cannon, and a couple of other newcomers studied Reagan closely in meetings, to see if he was mentally sound.

Reagan passed this personal inspection with ease. Evidently, the question of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment was never raised again.

There has been something of a respectful silence in most quarters about Reagan’s possible mental impairment prior to leaving office, but one interesting voice, recently, has been that of Walter Mondale, who, as the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1984, debated Reagan twice. As he recounted in his recent memoir, “The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics,” in the midst of telling an anecdote during the 1984 debate, about driving down the Pacific Coast in California, Reagan began to lose the story’s thread, stirring public concern. At the time, the Mondale campaign chose to keep its silence about the gaffe. But Mondale told me, in a conversation about his book, that he found Reagan so shaky during the debate that “I was scared he’d fall down.” In retrospect, he now wonders whether the country was glimpsing early signs of Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease. “I think when you look at that performance,” Mondale said, “there’s some question whether he wasn’t beginning to lose it. But in the second debate, he looked alert again.”

It may be that President Reagan just had good days and bad days, and that these ups and downs were not specifically linked to the Alzheimer’s disease he was diagnosed with not long after leaving office. But if Ron Reagan had worries about his father’s state of mind in the midst of his Presidency, he was not alone.